December 21, 2007
Right in the lumber yard
That’s Michael O’Keefe, a/k/a Danny Noonan, on the left—barely visible here as in the movie.
Actually, one more thing about Michael Clayton. This film was full of revelations, but the most shocking came during the closing credits, when I learned that the character of Barry—Clayton’s in-house rival—had been played by none other than Michael O’Keefe. I never would have recognized little Danny Noonan in this smug, button-down jerkface, which means either that O’Keefe is a superb actor or that much too much time has gone by since Caddyshack.
I think I’ll go with the former—after all, he was nominated for an OscarRRR for The Great Santini. The former leads down the path of the Dark Musings, which are not at all appropriate for this festive season. Although that doesn’t explain why he had such a small part. Never mind—it’s time for bed anyway.
Noonan!
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December 19, 2007
My One-Word Review of "Michael Clayton" (with apologies to Cecil Vortex)
Gripping.
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December 18, 2007
An approximately real piece of dialogue
(A soon-to-be-released movie is under discussion.)
“That actor is in it.”
“Which actor?”
“That guy who was in Being John Malkovich.”
“Which one?”
“You know…that guy.”
(Pause) “You mean John Malkovich?”
“Yeah.”
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October 22, 2007
Movie title du jour
Today’s title is for a comedy set in the world of higher learning—maybe Harvard, or maybe Yale, which as the alma mater of George W. Bush is an easy target. It features the madcap hijinks of a couple of unsuccessful standup comedians who, for reasons yet undetermined, are on the run from the mob. While hiding out on a college campus, they are mistaken for visiting professors and zany hilarity ensues. The title:
“Academia Nuts.”
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October 11, 2007
Not everything is illuminated
I work very hard to be judicious with the vast power conferred upon me by this blog. This means, as much as possible, keeping to the positive, focusing on the good things in life and in culture. But every once in a while I feel obligated to warn you, the innocent and delicate public at large, away from something particularly pernicious.
For instance, you may have read Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated and be asking yourself, why don’t I go ahead and see the movie as well, just for curiosity’s sake? Or conversely, you may be thinking you can save yourself the trouble of reading it by the age-old subterfuge of watching the film instead.
I’m here to tell you that in either case, you are making a tragic error. Leadfoot and I both recently read the book and figured we would further stimulate our intellects with Liev Schreiber’s cinematic adaptation starring Elijah Wood.
In a word: Ugh.
I tried, really tried to give this film a break—partly because I hate to be one of those snooty people who always want to tell you how much better the book was, and partly because I’m a fan of Schreiber’s acting work. Certainly I was fully forewarned that it would be very different from the book; there was no way Safran Foer’s use of multiple voices and novelistic flights of fancy could be rendered visually. But even taken on its own terms, the movie is dreadful (I hesitate to call it Everything Is Illuminated; it doesn’t deserve to be called that—maybe “Everything Is Clunky and Unconvincing” would be better.) This is some kind of perfect storm of bad movie adaptations: They take the title, the names of the characters, and one of the plotlines, throw it up onscreen with a few Holocaust references and a character’s death that seems totally gratuitous in this context, and call it a day.
If I were JSF, I would sue everyone involved in this disaster. I’m sure he got well paid and all, but it must be mortifying as a writer to have your work so heinously misrepresented. Not only do you have people all over the world mistakenly thinking that the dreck they just sat through is the same as what you wrote, but suddenly the most common edition of your book is one with an image from the movie on the cover. Could any amount of money be worth that? Well, probably. If anyone’s interested in buying this blog entry and adapting it as anything at all, please write a number on a napkin and mail it to my representatives at the Tainted Lake Agency, Oakland, CA. We’ll sit down over the Thanksgiving holiday, toss back a few Manhattans, and talk turkey.
In the meantime, best avoid any movies purporting to be based on novels, just to be on the safe side. That means The Kite Runner is out, and also the new Coen brothers movie. Too bad, but how can I help you if you don’t do as I say?
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January 1, 2007
The Return of Kelly Leak
A young Jackie Earle Haley and (sigh) Tatum O’Neal.
I don’t necessarily want to take credit for the miraculous resurrection of Jackie Earle Haley. But. I would like to point out that I wrote a bit about Haley, more or less at random, back in July 2005. At the time, he was just beginning a comeback that has now become full-blown, with talk of an OscarRRR nomination for his role in Little Children. Probably just a coincidence, but can you say with full 100% confidence that all this would have happened if I hadn’t been moved by my viewing of Breaking Away to wonder what the hell ever happened to J.E.H.? No, you can’t. There are forces at work here larger than Jackie or myself.
For more info about the comeback, check out this article and the accompanying interview on SF Gate.
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November 27, 2006
Homeworld Diaries—Part 3
The Englishman in this photo is not, in fact,
dead, although he certainly appears to be.
In Hollywood, I’m told, 18– to 20-hour days are routine. We weren’t doing anything close to that—more like 12 hours—but still, it got to be a grind. Some of us are not used to rising at the crack of dawn to start loading and unloading equipment. This is what leads to scenes like the one pictured above.
The first day or two, I was too worked up to notice how tired I was. But by Wednesday I was entering a fugue state, and by Friday I was in full-on survival mode, struggling to hold up my end while grabbing a little shuteye between takes. It took me about a week to recover completely.
And yet I have returned twice to do more work on the film, and if they ask me a third time I will probably go back again. Why? Because I hate myself. No, actually because it was really a lot of fun. The action, the camaraderie (camera-derie?), the pleasing sense of something being made in an atmosphere of creativity. It would probably kill me to live like this on a regular basis, but as a hobby it beats the hell out of stamp collecting. Not that I want to pick a fight with the philatelists; they’re a dangerous lot, in their way.
So what will the final product be like? I have no idea, and it’s not under my control, but I have faith in out beloved leader, Phil Hudson. He knows his shit. And by the way, if you ever direct a movie, try to run your set the way Phil did—moving along at a snappy pace while keeping things light and maintaining a sense of humor.
The name of that movie, once again, is Homeworld. Be sure to check the Web site often for release infomation. In the meantime, for my amusement and possibly yours, here are some more photos from the set.
Risking neck cramp to watch dailies.
Sound guy in a rare moment of repose.
Filmmaker as cyborg.
There was a good reason for this, I think.
Really, it all makes perfect sense in context.
No cracks about actors, please. After all, you need to know
what you’re going to look like in the shot.
Our heroes.
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November 24, 2006
Homeworld Diaries—Part 2
The assistant director is having a moment.
Life on a film set is a strange mixture of frantic action and abject boredom. People had told me this before, but it wasn’t till Fort Bragg that I came to appreciate it myself. You race around to get the shot set up, and then most of the time you end up waiting: waiting for the actors to be ready, waiting for the light to be right, waiting for traffic to pass, waiting for the fucking sound guy to get his act together.
Thus it is that filmmaking, although often a high-speed, high-pressure activity, allows many moments for quiet contemplation. This is especially true during that one minute out of the day when the F.S.G. calls for quiet on the set so he can record the room tone, i.e. what it sounds like in this particular location without any added noise. It’s only in situations like this that you begin to appreciate just how long a minute can be—long enough to have a dozen different cascading trains of thought, to experience epiphanies and regrets and fantasies and anything else the human mind is capable of.
(This was captured very well in Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion, which is the Spinal Tap of movies about movies. Toward the end the audio engineer of the film within the film takes room tone, and DiCillo uses this period of enforced silence to cut around to the various characters and get us to think about what they’ve been through. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Living in Oblivion in a while; note to self.)
Anyway, I found myself looking around amazed at the contrast between the image that was in front of the camera—sometimes just a single actor, or a spider web, or a rock—and everything out of the frame that made that image possible. It struck me that all those people standing around looking at the monitor, or listening to headphones, or holding reflectors and diffusers, or just patiently holding still till the shot was over, were all servants of the camera. The director is the high priest, the rest of the crew are acolytes, and the actors occupy a privileged position, because they will be Seen. In this sense, only what goes into the lens is real; everything else, though you can see it, is an illusion.
Why do we do it? Why do we bow down to the magical recording machine, carry it around with gentle reverence like some aged maharishi, and run ourselves ragged to serve its needs? Simple: immortality. The recorded image has the potential to last forever, and we will fade away. These are the kinds of morbid thoughts you can have when things get too quiet. Now, I think, I will go watch something funny on the television.
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November 22, 2006
Homeworld Diaries—Part 1
Watch out, these woods are infested with film crews.
It was a fine August day when I arrived in Fort Bragg (Mendocino County, not North Carolina) for my first day on the set of the movie that was then called Homeworld-X (it’s since lost the “X”). I had only the vaguest idea of what to expect. The others who were there had already been working together for a couple of weeks, so at first I felt lost, an outsider who doesn’t get any of the jokes.
Fortunately, I was given what may be the best job on a film set: second assistant camera, or to name it more accurately, slate guy. (My only interaction with the camera came during handheld sequences, when I occasionally held it between takes so the director could rest his arms.) This involves kicking off every shot by announcing the scene and take number, clapping the slate, then quickly moving to a safe place out of the frame and remaining quiet and stationary until you hear the word “cut.” Then you update the slate with the new scene or take number, and do it over again.
This is far from mind-taxing, though it does require a certain amount of focus to make sure you’ve always got your numbers right. Each scene consists of a master shot (say Scene 49) and a number of secondary or close-up shots, each of which gets its own letter (49A, 49B, etc.). It was sometimes a little tricky to figure out exactly what constituted a new shot, rather than just a different take of the same shot.
But this was the extent of the challenge involved in the job, leaving me with lots of of processor time left to observe what was going on around me. Also, because the slate has to be ready the instant the shot is set up, I was generally excused from the other tasks around the set like setting up reflectors and clearing brush; instead I mostly stood around watching others do these things, always my preferred working method.
I also spent a lot of time watching Pedro the sound guy, who aside from Phil the director was the only professional on a set full of enthusiastic amateurs. He had a lot of pressure on him, because he had to set up complicated microphone arrangements in very short periods of time, but never—OK, very rarely—showed any signs of stress. Pedro was so unflappable that it was the third day, I think, before he told me that my loud slate clapping was causing him pain.
You see, because the sound guy needs to hear every single thing that is happening during the scene, he is listening with headphones turned way up. Therefore, any loud sound near a microphone is going to hurt him. I remember a particular scene where one of the actors screamed a line at the top of his lungs. He was asked to moderate the volume but was so In the Moment that he kept forgetting; so at the same point during every take I would look over and see Pedro wincing as his ears were blasted. But he never cried out and ruined the take, and that’s what I call professionalism.
In truth, for a group of volunteers, our crew mostly handled itself very professionally, with one or two exceptions. One guy did get fired during the week. It’s not so easy to get fired from a job you’re not being paid for, but he pulled it off. I myself struggled to make it through the week for reasons having to do with sheer exhaustion; more on that later.
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September 29, 2006
A Machine of Illusions
“Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began. They stayed up all night looking at the pale electric bulbs fed by the plant that Aureliano Triste had brought back when the train had made its second trip, and it took time and effort for them to grow accustomed to its obsessive toom-toom. They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate the outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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January 28, 2006
A bad day at the movies
I haven’t written much about movies on this site, mainly because every movie that comes out now gets reviewed a thousand times, and who needs more? But yesterday I had an experience at the cinema so unpleasant that I want to share it, just to make sure no one else suffers the same fate.
It was Friday afternoon at the end of a not very good week, so I decided to treat myself by taking in a matinee of Woody Allen’s latest film, Match Point. What little I had heard about this film had led me to believe it was a romantic comedy involving tennis. I figured at worst I would get to spend two hours ogling the sublime she-creature we call Scarlett Johansson.
And there were some good opportunities for that, including a love scene in the rain and a scene of her angry and braless that made a strong impression. But what I didn’t expect was that—
WARNING: I am about to give away everything about Match Point (it would be generous to call it “spoiling”). So if you’re a purist who wants to see this movie without knowing where it’s going, read no further. On the other hand, if you’re a thinking, feeling human being who wants to avoid a dreadful shock, read on.
What I didn’t expect was that it turned out to be an emotionally wrenching drama where Scarlett’s character ends up getting mowed down with a shotgun. And not just her, but also the old lady who lives down the hall from her. Thankfully, you don’t actually see it happen; but still, this is not what I was looking for from this film.
Now, I have no problem with a movie that takes unexpected turns. A while ago I wrote in praise of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which starts as one kind of movie and ends up as a completely different one. But there are two key differences: 1) I expect that kind of thing from a twisted fuck like David Cronenberg, and 2) the movie is called A History of Violence, so you’re prepared going in.
I can see how you could argue for Match Point’s legitimacy as a work of art. Woody’s taking a pretty bold risk with this plot, and to his credit he doesn’t cop out at the end. (Through sheer luck, the killer gets away with it.) I just wish I’d been prepared for it. I spent the last half-hour of this movie with my arms wrapped around me in the defensive posture I usually reserve for watching episodes of The Office. As traumatic film experiences go, the only thing I can think of that was worse is Requiem for a Dream, which remains on a level all its own.
And in truth, the horror of Match Point feels less like an artistic statement and more like gratuitous shock value. If Woody just wanted to make a point about the role chance plays in life, there were other ways to do it. There’s something sadistic about this film, and I’m not going to forgive him for it anytime soon.
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December 28, 2005
Vigoda Outlives Another One
I am saddened to report that we recently lost one of the great character actors, Vincent Schiavelli, who died of lung cancer on Dec. 26.
You may think that you don’t know who Vincent Schiavelli was, but you’re wrong. Study the photo above and you’ll recognize him from such movies as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Night Shift (or from such lesser work as Death to Smoochy, 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up, or The Gong Show Movie). He also had an extensive TV resume, including an especially memorable role as Latka and Simka’s priest on “Taxi.”
Because of his lopsided looks and size (nearly 6-foot-6), Schiavelli was generally cast as weirdoes and heavies. In real life, he was something of a renaissance man, equally renowned for his skills as a chef as for his acting. A few factoids from IMDB:
• In 2001, he received the James Beard Journalism Award.
• His grandfather, whom he grew up with, was a cook for an Italian baron before moving to the United States.
• His character Peter Panama on “The Corner Bar” (1972) was the first sustained gay character on American network television.
So long, Vincent. We shan’t see your like again.
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October 25, 2005
Movie recommendation
Anytime someone makes a movie that truly surprises me in this day and age, I figure they’ve accomplished something. David Cronenberg’s new one, A History of Violence, starts off looking like it’s going down one particular road and then just keeps making left turns. You really never know what’s going to happen next, which makes for a very nervous-making viewing experience. At times the suspense is downright Hitchcockian, and in fact there’s a moment early on that makes me think of Psycho…but I won’t elaborate any further, because I don’t want to give anything away.
Cronenberg has always been a master of twisted cinema, and this one is no exception, though it’s twisted in a much different way than his early horror films. I highly recommend it, with the caveat that it’s extremely brutal, both violence-wise and psychology-wise, though not gratuitously so. This is not a good popcorn movie, but it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking.
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July 6, 2005
Tour de France 2005, Interlude
The cable box had a meltdown overnight and had to be reset, so I missed this morning’s broadcast of Stage 5. No need for panic, though; everything’s OK now and I’ll be able to catch the expanded coverage at 9 PM.
So I used my extra time today to go to the gym and to watch Breaking Away, which has been sitting in my Netflix pile for a couple weeks now.
The first thing I noticed about this movie is how much star Dennis Christopher looks like Beck:
I mean, it’s spooky, isn’t it?
So what happened to this guy? In the 70s he was in Fellini’s Roma, Robert Altman’s 3 Women, and this. He was named one of the “Promising New Actors of 1979.” In 1981 he was in Chariots of Fire, and then…well, his resume includes things like 1987’s Alien Predator (a.k.a. Cosmos Mortal, a.k.a. Mutant 2, a.k.a. Mutant II, a.k.a. The Falling); 1991’s Dead Women in Lingerie; 1992’s Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story; 1994’s Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II; and 1995’s Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare. Apparently he continues to work, though — last year, he played Joshua “Carrots” Beale in the New Zealand film The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, a.k.a. California Gold.
The second thing I noticed about Breaking Away is that Jackie Earle Haley is in it. In 1976, Haley played Kelly Leak, the biggest, toughest Bad News Bear, the one who rides a motorcycle and can slam the shit out of a baseball. In Breaking Away, made three years later, he plays Moocher, whose defining characteristic is that he’s short.
I say again, what happened? Did all those cigarettes he smoked while playing Kelly in three Bad News Bears films stunt his growth? You have to think that Jackie Earle Haley could bring a fairly lucrative lawsuit against the tobacco industry for damage to his career, which after 1979 got pretty spotty. He was in the Breaking Away TV series (the only one of the four friends in the movie to take the gig; Christopher was replaced by Shaun Cassidy); made four more films in the 80s; then landed roles in Gravedale High (1990), Dollman (1991), Nemesis (1993), Prophet of Evil: The Ervil LeBaron Story, and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1993). After that, he dropped out of sight completely, hopefully of his own volition; he seems to be mounting a comeback, though, because his IMDB page lists two movies currently in production. Just for kicks, here’s a picture of him bald:
The third thing I noticed about Breaking Away was a brief appearance by P.J. Soles, credited by her full name, Pamela Jayne Soles. Those of you saying to yourselves right now, “Who’s P.J. Soles?”, obviously were not 14-year-old boys when Stripes came out. Here she is with Bill Murray:
P.J. was one of Hollywood’s favorite babes for a while, with roles in Halloween, Carrie, and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Her career after Stripes in 1981 shows a similar arc to Christopher’s and Haley’s, with roles in things like Saigon Commandos, Alienator, B.O.R.N. (a.k.a. Merchants of Death), Mirror, Mirror IV: Reflection, and this year something called Pee Stains and Other Disasters. In her case I won’t say “What happened?”, because her shtick was always bubbly and cute (or in horror films, screaming and cute), and that’s not going to last you much past 30. She too continues to work, though, with roles in five movies in 2005.
Finally, the last thing I noticed about Breaking Away (Jesus, this thing has gotten long; I seem to have diarrhea of the blog today) was that it’s about a guy named Dave who recovers from a catastrophic wipeout to win the bike race of his life. Which brings us right back to the Tour de France. Is this a sign that Dave Zabriskie will recover from yesterday’s disaster and go on to unseat Lance Armstrong as Tour champion? I’m hesitant to go on record predicting such a thing, especially since, as I pointed out Monday, he’s not even the leader of his team. But if it happens, I fully intend to edit this entry to show that I did predict it.
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